was a Japanese writer. Many of her works are associated with the Atomic bomb literature genre. Biography Ōta was born Hatsuko (初子, "first born") Fukuda in Hiroshima to a wealthy landowner and his second wife Tomi. In 1910, her mother divorced her husband and gave her in adoption to a family named Ōta, but she was later taken back into the household of her mother's third husband. As a young girl she read Takuboku Ishikawa and Shūsei Tokuda, as well as Goethe, Heine and Tolstoy. After graduating from high school in 1920, she worked briefly as a primary school teacher before taking various jobs as a secretary and typist. She married in 1926, but soon left her husband after being confronted with the fact that he was already married, and had her child adopted. After repeated contributions to Nyonin Geijutsu, a magazine solely dedicated to female writers, she moved to Tokyo for the second time (after a previous one-year-long stay) in 1930. She continued publishing stories in other journals and newspapers, including a novel which fictionalised her second failed marriage (1936–37). In 1940, Ōta's war novel Sakura no kuni ("The cherry land") was awarded a prize by the Asahi Shimbun, and received considerable public acclaim. She continued with a series of works in favour of Japan's expansive foreign politics and war efforts, which she later omitted from her curriculum vitae. In August 1945 she experienced and survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Her short story Katei no yō na hikari ("A light as if from the depths") was published on 30 August 1945 in the Asahi Shimbun, making it the first published literary text on the atomic bomb. Stricken with the fear that she would become a victim of radiation sickness, she worked feverishly to complete City of Corpses (Shikabane no machi), an account of her experiences in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. The novel was written in the autumn of 1945, but then was censored and finally published three years later with portions deleted. An unedited version was eventually published in 1950. This was followed by Ningen ranru ("Human tatters", 1951), which was awarded the Women's Literary Prize. Ōta's 1953 short story Fireflies (Hotaru) follows the protagonist's meetings with survivors of the Hiroshima bombing and also addresses, as do some of her other works from that era, the suicide of writer Tamiki Hara. Her novel Han ningen